Unschooling as a Political Activity
by Camy Matthay ©2000
Delight
and liberty,
the
simple creed of childhood
-Wordsworth
Parents homeschool their children
in America for many reasons, but the initial motive is generally protective
-against an environment they see as unable to conform to their convictions
about how children should be raised and educated. For the most part, homeschooling
parents on the political right homeschool their
children to protect them from ideas and values that conflict with their
religious beliefs, whereas homeschooling parents on
the left are motivated by the desire to protect their children from an
environment they foresee as incompatible with creative life.
I am on the left end of the spectrum; to have expected my
children to spend the best hours of their childhood in relative confinement
from life would have been the worst sort of hypocrisy on my part -a violation
of the Golden Rule. Moreover, given the
fact that my own experience in school had restrained my thinking while falsely
inflating my ego, it was impossible for me to pretend that my children, even if
they were ranked among the "gifted and talented," could survive the
schooling experience ethically unscathed.
Beyond my wariness about institutionalizing children, the
style of attachment parenting I had adopted (since the birth of my first child)
precluded an abrupt severance of the bonds and obligations I valued. I had spent years honoring maternal work in a
society that expected women to prioritize an income of their own. Though others tried to convince me of the
virtues of sending my kids to school and "getting another life," I
was enchanted with the one that I had. I
loved being with my children, they ranked among the most entertaining people I
knew and -in the five years we had
shared so far- among the best teachers I ever had; they had convinced me
through their incessant desire to know more, to explore more, to want more
complexity, that nothing short of darkness and confinement would keep their
engagement in the world from growing more sophisticated. I could not be complacent about
"reassigning" the task of rearing and educating them to people I
didn't know.
As the years went by, and so many of my assumptions about
learning were deconstructed, I became increasing grateful that I hadn't caved
in to the illusion of school as a benign, if not "great"
institution. Detached from one of the
most ubiquitous conventions in the lives of American families, I saw that
schools could not be responsive to the remarkable styles of learning that
children develop, nor truly sensitive to the developmental differences that
exist between children of a given age. I
saw how schools harm children by stratifying them in narrow classes, by
encouraging them to compete against each other, by coercing them to do (often
dull) work, by comparing their achievements against external standards, by
rewarding the "best and brightest," and denigrating the rest. In short, processes that had once seemed
normal and inevitable now seemed inhumane and absurd.
From
my own experiences in school I knew how restricted the sympathy of teachers was
for the great latitude of ability and talent that exists in children. I saw how the shape of my own children's
academic interests, superimposed against the typical "six major subject
areas" of school curriculums, would look less like nice, neat hexagons,
than octopi-like forms with various-sized tentacles; their abilities and
investigations of the world were that unique.
Bearing in mind the relative freedom my children had to shape and
structure their own lives, I understood what John Holt, author of How
Children Fail, meant when he wrote that schools were sad places for
children; that children deserved so much more since by nature they were so
curious, so willing to participate in the social life of a particular place,
and so hospitable to goodness.
In addition, I recognized that though the nominal purpose
of schools -public or private- is to educate, as institutions, their primary
purpose is, simply, to stay in business.
And so, vast resources, which could otherwise be used for more worthy
social purposes, are diverted to support a bureaucratic infrastructure. A corollary of this is that teachers,
especially, those in government schools, cannot be half as creative as they
might like to be since their job security relies on their own conformity to
narrowly prescribed methods of instruction and on meeting standards of
achievement dictated by state policies.
One
of the most difficult things for mainstream people to accept is that when
children aren't meddled with, but just supported with resources that meet their
declared needs, rarely does their desire to achieve competence fail them. And that statement doesn't give the thinnest
allusion to the extraordinary achievements of children who are encouraged to
experiment and deviate, and are free to use their entire community as a
resource for learning.
* * *
Children, as all parents know, are
insatiably curious when they are not repressed.
Young children can be so outspoken and desirous of information that they
are fatiguing. This kind of desire and
energy is inexhaustible; as a sole motivating force, it can fuel a lifetime of
inquiry. These observations alone ought
to be enough to convince us that children don't need “teachers” -or
schools. For those of us who spent years
in school waiting to be taught a "standard" curriculum by
"certified" individuals, this is a difficult idea. Yet, when we sift through the evidence of our
own experience, we know that learning
is independent of teaching. As Peter
Elbow wrote in Writing Without Teachers, since "students can learn
without teachers even though teachers cannot teach without students, the
deepest dependency is not of students upon teachers, but of teachers upon
students." The opposite seems to be
true only when we have unwittingly come to accept the teaching function as
concentrated in a class of professional specialists who do their work only in
specialized localities.
Before the l830's, i.e., before the
advent of public schooling, children were educated by their parents, by their
neighbors, and in their communities; the teaching "function" was
diffused throughout the community. It
would not have occurred to parents to question their ability to help their
children become useful members of society; life was filled with meaningful
work, and children were welcome, if not expected, to watch, to listen, and to participate
as fully as they were able in the work going on around them. At that time in history, in the vital
communities that existed, few parents would have had doubts about their ability
to help their children achieve.
Today, the most frequent response I
hear from parents when confronted with the idea of homeschooling
is "I couldn't do that," or even, "I could never do
that." This lack of self-confidence
suggests many bad things, but in the most general and ubiquitous way, I think,
reveals the extent to which schools have been successful in the subjugation of
the masses they claim to "educate".
Whatever the reason may be, this shrunken capacity for responsibility
betrays the degree to which parents have relinquished their independence and
their family's autonomy to individuals "better" than themselves. It also suggests how dependent parents have
become on the baby-sitting function of schools; kids are attended to while
their parents work to provide for their family's needs for shelter, sustenance,
and the accouterments required to display their class position in society.
Schools, again, as places that
habitually judge and stratify human beings, have played a significant role in
cultivating submissiveness to authoritarian and hierarchical principles. Harsher critics -without any intended irony-
would say that schools were never intended to train an alert, politically
active body of citizens, but to inculcate habits of obedience and punctuality
for the emerging industrial order; that the architects of the American
educational establishment had obsessive concerns for industrial productivity
and social order, and that schools were designed to create a compliant working
class. John Taylor Gatto,
author of Dumbing us Down, summed it up
this way, "Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they
do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the
pyramid."
Do we need schools?
No. Children certainly
don't. Again, it's the other way
around. The more pertinent question -one
that has gone dormant for about l70 years- is, who does need schools? Well, it may seem pretty obvious who's going
to lose their shirts if children don't go to school. Teachers, administrators, and corporations
that provide materials or services that would never be bought outside of
schools -like textbooks, and (those "nutritious") schools
lunches. But actually, teachers, at
least good teachers don't need schools any more than children do. However, insofar as the word teacher means
surrogate parent or day-care provider -yes, it is self-evident that communities
need teachers since so many parents are not particularly interested in a life
inclusive of children. And we
desperately need teachers who understand that preserving children, fostering
their growth, and rendering them socially acceptable is a work of
conscience.
If teaching means "imparting specific knowledge or
skill", but not "systematic instruction" (Webster’s definitions
of education), I also think that teachers can be useful, even critical, but
only in a context where the student initiates the relationship and has control
over the breadth and length of that engagement.
Such a relationship would be quite different from the authoritarian
asymmetry found in schools; teachers in schools have the right to command, and
correlatively, the right to be obeyed. A
relationship where students hire their own mentors and make their own
arrangements for study would be different.
The seniority of the mentor could not inflate into arrogance or abuse
without penalty. Despite whatever
stature the prospective mentor might have in their field of interest, if their
talent is not counterbalanced by kindness and respect, their instructive role
would come to naught; students who are disillusioned could move their attention
elsewhere.
To my mind, this is the only educational relationship
possible. It would be no small thing to
be sought out by students who are so impressed with your work that they long to
receive some guidance in the interests and culture of your life. In a community where such relationships are
valued, the quality of teaching and teachers would be continually improving
through self-correction. Much honor
would be accorded to teachers who would continue to be sought out for help and
instruction, and bad teachers would be culled through neglect.
But what about the good teachers in schools? And what about
schools?
Again, unschoolers are not
unaware of the fact that thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as
teachers, aides, and administrators.
However, we believe that the abstract logic of schools as institutions,
and especially, of schools as institutions in the employ of a state (now overly
aggrandized to suit the needs of its corporate sponsors), overwhelms the
contributions that any individual may make on behalf of helping children to
direct their own lives with dignity and integrity. Public schools cannot do this because the
criteria of measurable achievement, and the exigencies of classroom life -of
coping, for example, with twenty-five children at once- demands efficiency and
the subjugation of students. Although it
is commonly believed that private schools improve on many of these details,
ironically, they rarely do. Behind their
elitist facades, various ideologies, even, in some cases,
"child-centered" curriculums, private schools can make no claim to
immunity from the worst flaw of public schools -that is, they circumscribe and
restrict the lives of children.
As Grace Llewellyn put it in The Teenage Liberation
Handbook, "the overwhelming reality of schools is CONTROL." And schools control children by establishing
standards for them to live up to or fall down on, and as Gatto
wrote, "by pre-empting fifty percent of the total time of the
young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own
age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think the
same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade
vegetables--and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways." This is what parents accept when a slow,
organic process of self-awareness, self-discovery, and cooperation is what is
required for anyone to grow and develop with their humanity left intact.
Even as early as l839, Orestes Brownson,
one of the most perceptive critics of schools, wrote that those in favor of
institutionalizing children had forgotten that children were "best
educated in the streets, by the influence of their associates, in the fields
and on the hill sides, by the influences of surrounding scenery and
overshadowing skies . . . by the love and gentleness, or wrath and fretfulness
of parents, by the passions and affection they see manifested, the
conversations to which they listen, and above all by the general pursuits,
habits, and moral tone of the community."
Schools robbed the potential of neighborhoods and communities to be, as
they always had been, the best nurseries of civic life, and buttressed the most
obnoxious feature of class societies, the separation of learning from life
experiences.
Under the pretext of offering parents a service, which
parents were often forced -in some cases, at gunpoint- to accept, schools
weakened families and replaced much of the "delight and liberty" of
childhood with a classroom. The
educational establishment, thus, simultaneously procured a justification for
taxing its citizens and a mechanism for manufacturing compliance to the
requirements of the emerging industrial order.
Ignorant of the history of resistance in the formative years of public
schooling, and so indoctrinated by the propaganda of the establishment, most
parents today are actually grateful for this service that diminishes their
wealth and freedom. This process
exemplifies the meaning of what Noam Chomsky called
"the creation of necessary illusions" -in this case, the initial
indignation of parents against mandatory schooling was transmuted into
appreciation for the "experts" who know best.
* * *
If schools did nothing more insidious than restrict the
time and freedom that children would otherwise have to use their entire
community as a resource for learning that would be depressing enough. But, in addition, by imposing external
standards against which the progress of children is measured, schools are
injurious to the self-esteem of children -and not just to those who do not fit
their models of development, but to all children whether or not they are identified
as "challenged" or "gifted and talented." Schools mock egalitarian ideology and do
further damage to the dignity of children when they require them to compete for
promotion, rewards, and limited positions on the roster of "superior"
beings.
John Holt, considered by many to be the grandfather of the
"growing without schooling" movement, underscored the deleterious
effects of measuring and testing children when he wrote, "I think the only
way in which children, or indeed anybody gets a sense of dignity, competence,
worth, and self-esteem is by succeeding by their standards to their own
satisfaction, not anybody else's, at tasks of their own choosing. They don't feel this way learning to jump
through hoops which we hold up higher and higher. . . it is only when they
choose a task and complete it to their own satisfaction that they get this
sense of growth and development."
Whereas schools refer to and create dependence on external
standards (increasingly crafted by corporations), unschoolers
try to foster intellectual self-reliance.
Whereas schools measure children and confine their thinking to specific
uniformities, unschoolers encourage children to gauge
their own progress and to make up their own minds in the context of a complex
world of dissenting opinions, obfuscation, and multiple histories.
* * *
Beyond the question
of what schools do to children, there is the whole question of what
schools do for children.
Schools, it is commonly understood, provide children with opportunities
for advancement. This is true. Schools function as arenas where children are
dazzled in various ways by the "promising" ideology of meritocracy
and taught to compete for the "easy life". Schools winnow the superior children from the
inferior ones, whose "failures", of course, cannot be the
responsibility of the system, since the losers, after all, were given an
"equal opportunity" to succeed.
It is in this way that schools play a role in American society as a
system of elite recruitment that appears to be fair and democratic.
This system, however, is meritocratic,
and is, in fact, a parody of democracy, since the "equal opportunities for
advancement" that meritocracy in theory offers to everyone are (as
everyone knows) unequal. The notion that
public and higher education is an efficient and equitable conveyor belt for
ambition betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. Anyone who takes a serious look at the
history of compulsory schooling in
This process of selective recruitment by schools is one of
the best courses of self-defense of the ruling elite since it drains talent
away from lower classes and deprives them of potential leadership. In addition, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in The Revolt of the Elites,
meritocracy has the effect of making the new elites arrogant and secure by
allowing them to maintain the fiction that the positions they have gained in
the upper echelons of society rests exclusively on their own brainpower and
diligence. Invested in the hubris of
thinking of themselves as "self-made", these new elites have little
awareness of what others have sacrificed on their behalf. They tend to merely put up appearances in
regard to ancestral and civic obligations, and operate as though the social
order that supports them has no reality or bearing on their lives. And finally,
they have the wealth to convince themselves this is so.
Precisely because of their contentment to remain ignorant,
i.e., their deliberate aloofness, these new elites tend to exercise the power
they have irresponsibly and indulgently.
"Their lack of gratitude," wrote Lasch,
"disqualifies meritocratic elites from the
burden of leadership [since] . . .they are less interested in leadership than
in escaping from the common lot--the very definition of meritocratic
success."
Furthermore, it turns out that the methods used by the
establishment to sort out the "worthy" and to promote meritocracy
merely reinforces the existing distribution of wealth and power. Allan Hanson, for example, in Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life,
reported that "intelligence tests are designed in part to promote equal
opportunity, but it happens that test scores are perfectly correlated with mean
family income." That is to say,
the tests used in schools to identify the "those most suited to rise"
are skewed in favor of rich kids.
Whether our society is still structured on hereditary
privilege or meritocratic principles is a moot issue
since both concentrate power and privilege in a small, specialized class. Though many Americans content themselves with
attacks on the former arrangement of power, the "aristocracy of
talented" who have emerged in the last century, have proven to be far more
ruthless than their antecedents who at least were familiar with the tradition
of noblesse oblige. These elites, mobile
and increasingly global in outlook, refuse allegiances to nation or community,
and are so insulated by power and wealth that they feel no need to care for
what happens to any place. "One
does not think to improve oneself by becoming better at what one is doing or by
assuming some measure of public responsibility for local conditions,"
wrote Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America, "one thinks
to improve oneself . . . by 'moving up'
to a 'place of higher consideration.' "
Acquisition and ostentation is the
driving force of meritocrats; the latest trends are
the cultural carrots of American life.
This is why the increasing collusion between corporations and schools is
so dangerous. In the onslaught of forces
forming desire, children -vulnerable and impressionable- have everything to
lose, and corporations have everything to gain by colonizing the minds of
"their" prospective consumers.
Whereas the emerging industrial order required a compliant working
class, the survival of the corporate order requires a compliant consuming
class.
* * *
Schools have always supported societies based on
hierarchies of privilege and power. In
Most Americans are
so ignorant of the historical record, that they don't know, Lasch
wrote, "that the promise of American life [that] came to be identified
with social mobility [occurred] only when more hopeful interpretations of
opportunity had begun to fade."
Today, Americans are so marginalized, or are so appropriated by a
mobilized economy driven by the compulsion to produce, that they are unable to
see how confined they are by system that values money over humanity, power over
truth, and conformity over creativity.
The pervasiveness of this sweeping epidemic of social blindness, is
underscored by the fact that the only coherent demand of those working on
behalf of the new social movements (feminism, gay rights, welfare rights, for
example) aims at inclusion in the dominant structure rather than at a
revolutionary transformation of social relations; instead of developing new
patterns in their daily lives, people scramble to seize the same
"rights" as those in power; instead of restructuring society from within,
activism exhausts itself by banging on the door of the
"kingdom."
It would be useful to know what the "more hopeful
interpretations of opportunity" were that we lost -that were snuffed out
l70 years ago by the educational establishment . . . . Not everyone seems to
know that history is supposed to teach us what it is to be human and what
humans have proved capable of. Not
everyone will have the energy to deconstruct what is false in his or her lives
-to construct different visions of social order. I feel pretty certain that the longer you
were schooled the harder it is to discover answers to those questions. This is because of the high degree of
collusion between academics and state policies, and the function of
universities -at least those closest to the centers of power- to groom
intellectuals in their roles as commissars of culture and society. As Noam Chomsky
pointed out in Manufacturing Consent, establishment intellectuals, as
service personnel to the ruling elites, will necessarily have been submitted to
the highest levels of indoctrination.
Bearing in mind what the social philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote, that "the aim of totalitarian
education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to
form any," I would argue that schools are one of the most oppressive
devices of American society -a "mind industry" whose biggest
achievement has been to precipitate a massive failure of social awareness and
imagination.
* * *
To understand this world and its injustices, it is critical
to step away from the tools (television, for example) and arenas of
indoctrination. In abstinence from
corporate-controlled media, from government schools, from mainstream culture .
. . when the world is outside the door and your family is inside, many doors of
perception open wide. When the center of
your life can drift back into a form that includes you as someone who is
important and your children as valuable unto themselves, than it will be clear
that the only opportunities schools provide serve the self-interest of an
American Empire that is crashing into the future.
Displaced from schools, one might recognize the
antidemocratic and exploitative nature of the meritocratic
educational establishment and acknowledge the absurdity of historical efforts
made to link egalitarian ideology with hierarchical structures. One might begin to see that the promise of
"opportunity" is a lie built on the shabbiest visions of humanity and
convictions about life. One might begin
to dream about the sort of society R. H. Tawney had
in mind when he wrote in Equality, "that opportunities to rise are
no substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization," and
"of the dignity and culture" that are needed by all "whether
they rise or not." . . . and to realize that any clues about how to build
a just society will not be found near the centers of power and influence.
* * *
Notwithstanding my knowledge that we are all embedded in a
particular society on a particular course, I hope that my own children
understand my dissent with mainstream culture.
If I am able to instill in them objectivity about the hurricane of false
meaning produced in our society, I believe that their capacity to think for and
believe in themselves will not be as foreshortened as mine was by the years I
spent in school. My greatest longing is
for my children to retain a clarity of mind, to conduct their lives with
compassion for others, and to understand the worth of working to create
self-sustaining, self-governing communities.
I would like them to be useful and to know and exalt the authentic forms
of happiness that can't be bought. I
want them to be capable of sober thoughts, and the action that clarifies what
is fair and true.